by JL Bryan
“Dale!” Anna shouted up the stairs. The hammering paused for a moment, then resumed. “Dale, the ghost detectives are here!”
The hammering continued.
“My husband will be down in a second,” Anna said with an apologetic smile. Though she was putting up a calm front, her hands were trembling.
“No rush,” I said. I wanted to put her at ease but wasn’t sure how. “Where did you move from?”
“Oh, Marietta. Outside Atlanta?” She pointed back over her shoulder.
“I’m familiar.”
“Chicago before that. Dale grew up there.” Anna took a deep breath and screamed: “Dale, get down here right now!”
The hammering stopped, and there was another loud bang, as if someone had thrown a hammer on the floor. Footsteps clomped on the stairs. A thin man about Anna’s age, his dark hair speckled with gray, stomped down from the landing.
“Anna, I can’t leave a bookshelf half-hung!” he snapped at his wife. He definitely had a Chicago accent. There was a lot of nose in that voice. “I had to finish that second nail. Maybe if you helped out more, you would understand—”
“Dale, the detectives are here,” Anna interrupted, pointing at us.
“What’s that?” Dale saw us, then straightened up. A look of confusion crossed his face as he looked at me and Stacey.
I knew that look. I saw it most often among older males—they get thrown off-balance by the idea of a female detective.
We introduced ourselves quickly. Dale’s voice became less whiny now that he wasn’t alone with his family.
“You have a beautiful home, Mr. and Mrs. Treadwell,” I added, eager to defuse any tension.
“It’s a wreck,” Dale said, shaking his head. “Real money pit, just like I said before we bought it. And that was before all the…” He shrugged, as if deciding he didn’t want to finish his sentence.
“Is there somewhere we can sit and talk?” I asked, glancing at the dining room, where eight chairs were spaced around the table.
“Maybe the dining room.” Anna and her family stepped around the piles of boxes to sit on one side of the table. Stacey and I took the opposite side, our backs to the two narrow windows that barely let in enough sunlight to pierce the gloom.
“I’m sorry about the clutter,” Anna added, gesturing helplessly at the pile of unpacked boxes beside her.
“If you don’t mind me asking, how did you end up moving to Savannah?” I asked.
“Oh, well, in our past life, Dale was vice-president of product development at AlgoSystems Data Management. Have you heard of them?”
I shook my head.
“Well, they’re a…software company, basically,” Anna continued. “And I was a corporate accounts executive at Southeastern Wireless. With our commutes and our careers, we barely saw each other, and Lexa practically lived at the daycare center. Together, Dale and I decided it was too much. We wanted to escape the rat race.” She touched her husband’s hand. He looked at the floor and slouched, as though maybe he wasn’t so happy about escaping that particular race. “We’d visited Savannah a couple of times, and it was just such a beautiful city…We decided to buy one of these big old houses and turn it into a bed and breakfast. We bought this place for a steal, even when you consider how dilapidated it is.”
“Yeah, we’ve stayed at some bed-and-breakfast spots around the country, and they’re usually run by idiots,” Dale said, perking up a little. “Just complete idiots. So we figured we could do it smarter. Imagine this: wife comes to husband, says she wants to spend a weekend at some fruity-fruit bed and breakfast in Savannah, so she can shop for antiques, visit museums, junk like that. Husband says no way. But wait, wife says. This one’s got a sports lounge right on the ground floor—we’re talking big-screen TV, beer on tap. Now husband’s like, heck yeah, I can catch the Bears game, let’s go!”
“Something to appeal to the whole family,” Anna explained.
“Can we make this quick?” Dale asked. “We have a lot to do around here. The girls say they’ve seen ghosts, but I don’t think so. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“We’ll move as fast as we can, Mr. Treadwell.” I said, mentally noting how he referred to both his wife and daughter as the girls.
I gently set my black steel toolbox on the floor, since I didn’t want to risk scratching their dining table. I popped the lid and brought out a long yellow legal pad, two pens, and a digital voice recorder.
I asked if it was okay to record the interview. Dale rolled his eyes, but nobody objected. I placed the device in the center of the table and tapped the record button.
“Okay, Mrs. Treadwell,” I said, since it was clear that Dale was the family skeptic. “Can you tell us why you believe your house is haunted?”
Chapter Two
“It started about two or three weeks after we moved in,” Anna Treadwell said.
“Sooner than that,” her daughter Lexa interrupted, shaking her head. “Like the first week.”
“Lexa was the first to experience it,” Anna said. “She heard a couple of noises at night, but we thought it was just an old house with a lot of unfamiliar sounds. Settling, creaking…”
“I still say that’s all it is,” Dale interrupted. “The girls are just hearing things and scaring themselves.”
“It is not!” Lexa snapped. “She wants us to leave. She wants us to move back home.”
“This is our home now, sweetie,” Anna told her daughter.
“It’s not my home. Or Maggie’s.” Lexa clutched the doll close to her chest. “Maggie doesn’t like it here.”
“We’ve heard enough of that, Lexa!” Dale snapped at his daughter. “We told you, we moved here, we’re staying here, and it’s all final. Damned kid’s regressing, carrying that doll around,” Dale said to me, as if Lexa weren’t even in the room.
“Dale, calm down,” the wife said, looking shaken. “We’re trying to figure this out.”
“Nothing to figure out,” Dale said. “You want to spend more money we don’t have on stuff we don’t need. Ghost hunters, Anna? Really?” He turned to look across the table at Stacey and me. “How much is this gonna set me back?”
“We haven’t even determined whether there’s an actual ghost,” I replied. “Our fees depend on a variety of factors—”
“Already sounds expensive,” Dale grunted.
“Dale, please,” Anna snapped at her husband. “This is important.”
Dale sighed and rolled his eyes again. “Couple of doors bang in the night, you girls get hysterical.”
“I am not crazy!” Anna shouted. “Lexa is not crazy. If you would just listen—”
“All I do is listen! I listen to you two complaining and griping all day long. Always some stupid thing or some other thing that’s even stupider than the last thing—”
“Why do you always think you know better than everyone else?” Anna hissed at him.
“Because I always do!” He slammed his fist on the table. “It’s not my fault I’m surrounded by idiots!”
Lexa had curled up in her chair, tucking her knees up to her chest and clutching the doll tight. She looked a little flushed. I couldn’t tell if the poor girl was scared or embarrassed. Maybe both.
Stacey and I were doing our best to keep our eyes on the table and pretend we weren’t in the room while our clients had their family argument. It was awkward.
“That’s enough of this crap.” Dale stood up. His voice was getting whiny again. “You can all sit here wasting time and scaring each other if you want. Somebody has to get some real work done.” He left the room and stomped away up the stairs.
“I’m sorry,” Anna told us, her voice quiet. “It’s been very stressful around here. I think he knows something’s wrong, but he doesn’t want to admit it…”
“Should we come back another time?” I asked, hoping she would say no.
“No!” Lexa shouted, sitting up in her chair. “You have to help us! You have to make her go away!”
“It’s okay, sweetie.” Anna tried to comfort the girl by patting her on the head again, but again Lexa pulled away from her. Anna looked at me. “We may as well go ahead.”
“Why don’t we start over?” I suggested.
“Okay.” Anna took a deep breath. “After we moved in, Lexa started having bad dreams. We thought it was because, you know, a new house in a new city…”
“It was the lady,” Lexa whispered. “Her eyes are like holes in the ground.”
“One night, Lexa came to our bedroom and woke us up,” Anna said. “She said there was somebody in the house.”
“I heard her footsteps,” Lexa added. “They came up the stairs. They stopped at my room. It was just footsteps that time.”
A loud banging sounded overhead. Dale was hammering again, louder and harder than before, as though trying to make some kind of point.
“We got out of bed and searched around,” Anna said. “We were a little worried about vandals and vagrants, since the house had been empty for a few years before we bought it. We didn’t find anybody, but then we checked downstairs, and the door to the main house was open.”
“Which door?” I asked.
“Down at the end of the hall.”
“The one with all the deadbolts?” Stacey asked. “I was wondering about that…”
“At some point, the east wing was walled off from the rest of the house,” Anna said. “It was a caretaker’s apartment. Only one door connects it to the main house, and that’s the door I’m talking about. It already had the deadbolts when we moved in, but two of the three are rusted and stuck open.”
“Was it locked when you went to bed that night?” I asked.
“We assumed we must have left it unlocked, so we threw the bolt and went back to bed,” Anna said. “I didn’t think too much about it then. We thought the footsteps were just another of Lexa’s bad dreams, and we expected those to stop once she got used to the house.”
“It wasn’t a dream,” Lexa insisted. “I heard the door open. It went cree-eeeeak. Then her footsteps.”
“It happened again the next night,” Anna said. “Lexa came into our room talking about footsteps. We found the door to the main house wide open, with a cold draft blowing in. I know the door was deadbolted that second night, because I double-checked before bed. My husband insisted I must have been wrong.” Anna rolled her eyes a little. “He said it must be the draft blowing open the door. So, the next night, I made him bolt the door and double-check it before bed.”
“And how did that go?” I asked.
“We actually didn’t have a problem that night,” Anna said. “But the next night—”
“She came back,” Lexa whispered. “I heard it from my bed. The door opened, the footsteps….Then I saw her.” Lexa crumpled up in her chair, not looking directly at anyone.
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” her mother said.
“First I heard the door, and I knew she was coming.” Lexa was barely speaking above a whisper, and Stacey and I had to lean in to hear her. “Then her footsteps. It was usually just a couple of steps, but this time they came all the way up the stairs.” Lexa was shivering, and she looked close to crying. “Then she came to my door and looked at me.”
“What did you see?” Stacey asked, clearly enthralled as if hearing a campfire story. I cut her a warning look. Don’t look so happy, I thought.
“You don’t have to tell us if it’s too scary,” I told Lexa. “But it would help if you did.”
Lexa whispered something, swallowing her words.
“It’s okay, sweetie.” Anna rubbed the girl’s back. “Can you say it a little louder?”
“I said she looked dead,” Lexa said, her eyes lifting to stare into mine. “She looked rotten. Her whole face. She had a raggy dress and her hair was really dirty. I couldn’t see too much because all the lights were out, but I could feel her looking at me.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I couldn’t move!” Lexa’s face screwed up and turned red. “I tried. I couldn’t even yell. I was too scared. So I just stayed there and wished she would go away. She was gone after a minute.”
“Back down the stairs?” I asked.
“Noooo…” Lexa shook her head furiously to emphasize how wrong I was. “She was just gone. I waited and waited and waited and then I tiptoed and looked out the door. She wasn’t in the hall. She wasn’t on the stairs. I ran to Mom and Dad’s room.”
“Lexa was really upset that time,” Anna said. “We searched all over the east wing again, but nobody was there.”
“And the security door downstairs?” I asked.
“Wide open again.” Anna shook her head and rubbed the fresh goosebumps on her arms. “Dale and I had both checked to make sure it was locked before sleep.”
I nodded. It was possible, I thought, that the girl was behind it all—first running downstairs and opening the door, then waking her parents and claiming to see and hear scary things. Lexa didn’t seem like she was lying to me, but you have to consider these possibilities.
“The lady started coming every night,” Lexa said. “Sometimes just footsteps. Sometimes I see her. She’s mean.”
“So we barricaded the door the next night,” Anna said. “Furniture and heavy boxes full of hardback books. Dale thought there must be some kind of problem with the deadbolt. I thought so, too. It was the only thing that made sense, you understand?”
“Of course,” I said.
“A loud crash woke me up later that night,” Anna said.
“It woke up everybody,” Lexa added.
“We told Lexa to stay in her room, then Dale and I ran downstairs.” Anna folded her hands on the dining table. She was trying to act calm, but her hands were trembling and her face had lost all its color.
“Downstairs, the boxes and chairs had fallen over, and some of the boxes had spilled open. It looked like someone had given the door a hard shove and knocked it all down, but only a really strong person could have pulled that off. And the deadbolt was wide open again. A draft came from the main house, and it smelled like…just rot and decay. Death.”
“She didn’t like that,” Lexa said. “When we tried to lock her out like that.”
“Dale called the police,“Anna said. “He was convinced it was a break-in. ‘Probably teenagers,’ he kept saying. ‘Probably just some idiot teenagers.’ The police looked around, but they didn’t find anybody. All the doors were locked and the windows latched, so nobody had broken in—not in the main house, or here in the east wing. There was no explanation. Lexa told them about the disappearing woman she’d seen.”
“Dad didn’t want me to tell the police about her,” Lexa said. “He got mad at me.”
“I tried to laugh it off, but I guess I wasn’t very convincing.” Anna forced a laugh. “Just before they left, one of the officers—an older man—pulled me aside and told me that if it kept happening, I might call your detective agency. He said Eckhart Investigations had cleared up a few hauntings around town. I just looked at him like he was crazy. Now I feel pretty bad about that.”
I’d been taking notes the whole time. Footsteps: possible auditory manifestation. The door opening, even when bolted and barricaded: possible psychokinetic activity. The vanishing dead woman: a full apparition. If the haunting was real, it was a major one, but nothing we couldn’t handle.
The only other explanation was an elaborate prank, which is more likely than it sounds. More than a few cases have turned out to be kids faking a ghost. I doubted Lexa was lying—she looked pretty scared and sleep-deprived—but logically I had to consider it.
“Let’s back up a second,” I said. “What exactly did you and your husband do after the crash woke you up? I mean from the first moment you were awake.”
“Well…” Anna tapped her fingernails as she thought about it. “First, we looked at each other. Kind of a ‘did you hear that?’ moment, but we didn’t have to say anything. We
both ran to the hall, and we checked on Lexa first, of course—”
“How much time passed between the crash and when you reached her room?” I asked.
“Not long. Five seconds, maybe. Less than ten, I’m sure. Why?”
“Just being thorough…” I jotted down her time estimate. “How did you find Lexa when you reached her room?”
“She was upset.”
“I was scared,” Lexa said, nodding.
“I mean, where in the room was she? Near the door?”
“Lexa was still in bed,” Anna said.
“You think I’m lying about the ghost,” Lexa said, scowling at me. “Just like Dad.”
“I didn’t say that, Lexa,” I told her. “I’m just trying to understand what happened that night.”
“Yeah, right.” She crossed her arms. “Are you going to help us or not?”
“I will if I can, Lexa. Have you seen anything else since that night?”
“She keeps coming to my room,” Lexa said. “Even if I lock the door, it opens. Sometimes I can see her. Sometimes it’s just footsteps.”
“Has anyone else had strange experiences?” I asked Anna.
“Dale says he’s never seen or heard anything, but I…” Anna hesitated and glanced at her daughter. “Lexa, do you want to go and play now?”
“No,” Lexa said.
“I need to speak with the detectives alone, sweetie.”
“You saw her.” Lexa turned her scowl on her mom. “You saw her and you don’t want me or Dad to know about it.”
“I just…have had strange feelings, especially at night.” Anna’s fingers twisted together on the table while she spoke. “Like there’s someone here who isn’t supposed to be here. Someone watching me.” She shuddered. “That’s all. But…well what do you think?” Anna looked at me. “Do you think we have a ghost?”
